Back to Blogging

by Tom on October 7, 2005

I’m pleased to say that, after a truly epic hiatus from blogging of more than a year on my part, my fellow Timberites have very kindly consented to my coming back on board to post here at CT. Nice one fellas.

For the last year I’ve stood to blogging much as Dick Cheney stood towards serving in Vietnam in the late ‘sixties, but the various pressures and distractions that have kept me from writing have receded significantly, so I’m planning to be hanging about the place, wittering pointlessly about such topics as may catch my fancy, much more regularly than hitherto. No, please, control your excitement, really, do.

As part of my re-entry into the blogosphere – do we still call it that, or is that just a bit too 2003? – I’ve wanted to grab hold of all the posts I wrote on my old blog before joining CT in the first place, to find them a home and serve ‘em up somewhere in public so that the peanut gallery can take aim, or indeed link to the damn stuff if it wishes.

Well, one thing I’ve found is that although the cool kids all used Movable Type, Blogger is still a deeply cool product. I’ve not put anything on the site since May 2003, still less ponied up any cash to maintain it, but tomrunnacles.blogpot.com appears to be basically intact. That’s very good, but after that date, I moved everything onto a hosted server which is, due to a series of oh-so-hilarious postal mixups, now defunct. I thought I’d lost all the stuff I’d written subsequently, but then I discovered the truly mind-boggling Wayback Machine, which truly makes elephants look like goldfish: it scrapes the web and archives what it finds, forever. They have a very good FAQ if you’re interested.

This is excellent news, in that if you’re the kind of doofus who forgets to renew his server fees, and I am, you can recover your work – my missing posts are here. It also induces, in me at least, a sense of something like vertigo to think of the sheer volume of data that archive.org has to manage. But finally, it’s a fairly sobering reminder that even if you trash your files yourself, and wait for the google cache to expire, your various web-related foolishnesses may remain visible for the public to cackle at for years to come.

something like vertigo to think of the sheer volume of data that archive.org has to manage

Well given that their live music archive holds 2,955 shows by the Grateful Dead and 607 more by Umphrey McGee (“Who???” you ask.) in lossless file formats the collected past outpourings of teh internets should be only a blimp on their server rack.

The Internet Archive is an amazing project. The main man behind it, Brewster Kahle, regularly gives incredible inspiring talks at tech conferences about their ultimate goal (universal access to all human knowledge), how it can be achieved, and what they are currently doing.

I can also personally attest to the wonder that is the Wayback Machine. A Seattle local environmental group had maintained a website, but due to a lack of diligence on the part of the site administrator passwords were lost, domain reg renewals weren’t paid, etc. In addition, the admin moved from his domain reg contact address, abandoned his registered e mail address & took a new phone #.

As a result, the group completely lost control of its site & domain (until I got it back after appealing for help to ICANN). But once I discovered the Wayback at least we had access once again to the original site content. It’s really quite miraculous & I sing the Archive’s praises in the post linked to this comment.